August First | Page 6

are afraid of what may come after, you admit that what you intend to do is impossible. If you were not convinced of something after, you would go on and do what you propose. Which shows that there is an error in your mathematics. Do you at all know what I mean?
I must make you understand. I can see why you find the prospect unendurable. You don't look far enough, that is all. Why do people shut themselves up in the air-tight box of a possible three score years and ten, and call it life? How can you, who are so alive, do so? It seems that you have fallen into the strangely popular error of thinking that clocks measure life. That is not what they are for. A clock is the contrivance of springs and wheels whereby the ambitious, early of a summer's day when sane people are asleep or hunting flowers on the hill-side, keep tally of the sun. Those early on the hill-side see the gray lighten and watch it flush to rose--the advent of the day-spring--and go on picking flowers. They of the clocks are one day older--these have seen a sunrise. There is the difference.
If you really thought that all there is to life is that part of it we have here in this world--if you believed that--then what you contemplate doing would be nothing worse than unsportsmanlike. But you do not believe that. You are afraid of what might come--after. You came to me--or you came to the rector--in the hope of being assured that your fear was groundless. You had a human desire for the advice of a "professional." You still wish that assurance--that is why you promised to wait for this letter. You told me your case; you wanted expert testimony. Here it is: You need not be afraid. God will not be angry--God will not punish you. You said that you did not know much about God. Surely you know this much--anger can never be one of His attributes. God is never angry. Men would be angry if they were treated as they treat Him--that is all. In mathematics, certain letters represent certain unknown quantities. So words are only the symbols for imperfectly realized ideas. If by "hell" you understand what that word means to me--the endlessness of life with nothing in it that makes life worth while--then, if you still want my opinion, I think that you will most certainly go there. God will not be angry. God will not send you there, you will have sent yourself--it will not be God's punishment laid on you, it will be your punishment laid by you on yourself. But it is not in you to let that come to pass.
All of the "philosophies of life," as they are called, are, I think, varieties of two. I suppose Materialism and Idealism cover them. Those who hold with the first are in the air-tight box of years and call it life. The others are in the box, too, but they call it time. And they know that, after all, the box is really not air-tight; each of them remembers the day when he first discovered that there were cracks in the box, and the day he learned that one could best see through those narrow openings by coming up resolutely to the hard necessary walls that hold one in. Then came the astounding enlightenment that only a shred of reality was within the cramped prison of the box--just a darkened, dusty bit--that all the beautiful rest of it lay outside. These are the ones who, pressing up against the rough walls of the box, see, through their chinks, the splendor of what lies outside--see it and know that, one day, they shall have it.
The others, the Materialists, never come near the walls of the box, except to bang their heads. Their reality is inside. These call life a thing. The Idealists know that it is a process, and there is not a tree or a flower or a blade of grass or a road-side weed but proves them right. It is a process, and the end of it is perfection--nothing less. The perfection of the physical is approximated to here in this world, and, after that, the tired hands are folded, and the worn-out body laid away. But even the very saints of God barely touch, here, the edges of the possible perfection of the soul. Why, it is that that lifts us--that possibility of going on and on--out of imaginable bounds, into glory after glory--until the wisdom of the ages is foolishness and time has no meaning where, in the reaches of eternity, the climbing soul thinks with the mind of God.
You were going to cut yourself off from that! At the very